Policy-Based Sanitizable Signatures

Sanitizable signatures are a variant of signatures which allow a single, and signer-defined, sanitizer to modify signed messages in a controlled way without invalidating the respective signature. They turned out to be a versatile primitive, proven by different variants and extensions, e.g., allowing multiple sanitizers or adding new sanitizers oneby-one. However, existing constructions are very restricted regarding their flexibility in specifying potential sanitizers. We propose a different and more powerful approach: Instead of using sanitizers' public keys directly, we assign attributes to them. Sanitizing is then based on policies, i.e., access structures defined over attributes. A sanitizer can sanitize, if, and only if, it holds a secret key to attributes satisfying the policy associated to a signature, while offering full-scale accountability.